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Comment by anonsivalley652 | Hacker News Reader

The "domain squatting" meme is intellectually dishonest and based on envy. People who buy zillions of domains must be allowed if people are allowed to buy as many stamps, boxes of paper, cars, jet skis or houses as they wish. It's called freedom, property rights and being consistent. If you want one of their domains that they registered and paid for before you so badly, inquire if they will sell it; if they choose to or not is their choice, and you are not entitled to it simply because you want it.

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Domains are real estate. Periodic land reform / redistribution is a staple of human history, when things become patently unbalanced for society as a whole.

Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole? What does that even mean? Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?

> Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole?

Not entirely yet, or it would have already entered the political debate. However, in many ways the proliferation (and success) of alternative TLDs indicates that there is an issue. You shouldn't have to use an Indian Ocean domain because .com is squatted to the wazoo.

We have lived through the land-grab era, sooner or later the redistribution era will come.

> Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?

Considering there are less than a million 4-ascii-letter combinations, obviously not. But there could be more stringent criteria for assignment and revocation, like limits per-company and per-individual, escalating costs in a way that hoarding becomes uneconomical, banning parking (which is absolutely doable, you just need an actual human judge), and so on.

The redistribution is happening every day, every day people are buying land-grab era domains they can extract value from.

The difference between domain names and let's say cars or boxes of paper, as you put it, is so obvious, I didn't think it needed saying. It's that (usable) domains are a unique and finite, whereas all your other examples are neither. You can't just wait for the next batch of domains to come out of the factory and buy them from their manufacturer (new gTLDs were an attempt at that and failed miserably).

It's the same problem as land. We have more and more people that need it, yet the supply is by definition finite. Hoarding it for yourself not only contributes nothing to the community, it actively prevents others from doing so.

You are correct, but our entire economy is setup to reward the exact land hoarding that against which you are arguing. OP is asking why domain name ownership would be treated differently.

"would" and "should" are not the same word.

> The "domain squatting" meme is intellectually dishonest and based on envy

Yup. Still waiting to hear a more nuanced explanation of the supposed “problem” than this.

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